Transcript

Morgan: In 2000 Samuel Sours was the Vietnam Veterans of America service representative
for Iowa. While serving in Vietnam for 27 months, he moved up the ranks from
supply clerk to door gunner to helicopter crew chief. Thirty years later he
expressed strong feelings about that war.

Sours: The biggest problem with it is the television coverage. They wanted
to show… some of them wanted to show the bad side of the war. That's what they
were there for. They were there to show the bad side, the bad side of what
our American boys were doing. They didn't bother showing the village after
the North Vietnamese or VC went through and did what they did.

Morgan: It's often said if you haven't been in the war, you have no business
passing judgment on the warriors. United States soldiers were plunged overnight
into a world of sniper fire, ambushes and confusion. It was hard to know if
a person was your enemy or ally.

Sours: Mostly it was we existed from day to day. We lived hard.

Morgan: In other wars, the United States was considered the good guys with
a clear but difficult task to beat the bad guys, saving the world from communism.
But the Vietnam War was different. We knew little about the country or its
people and got caught in the middle of a guerrilla war, leaving soldiers paranoid
and their commanders frustrated. America was in turmoil. People distrusted
the government. Military leaders were angry with politics for forcing them
to fight a limited war, and many turned against the soldiers when they returned
home.

Sours: A Vietnam veteran meets another veteran, we shake hands. We hug, some
of us. And we say, “Welcome home.” That's something we didn't get when we came
home. That's a sore spot with myself and a lot of other people. I was personally
spit on when I got off the plane. Protesters were across the fence and they
were spitting through the fence, throwing stuff at us when we came back. It's
the only time that soldiers that went to do what our country asked them to
do, we were treated like…we were called baby killers, murderers... Anything
but Americans.

Morgan: It has been three decades since the last of U.S. combat troops left
Vietnam, and our country is still coping with the damages inflicted by the
war. Nearly 2,000 American POWs still remain unaccounted for from that war.
And despite the mixed emotions about Vietnam, the fact remains that 58,000
Americans lost their lives.